If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

One of the nation’s most prominent abortion rights groups is working to remake its image in response to concern that it may be overtaken by a growing cadre of young anti-abortion activists.

Its message: This is not your mother’s NARAL.

With Ilyse Hogue, a former senior staffer at Media Matters for America and MoveOn.org, freshly installed as its president, NARAL Pro-Choice America is more outwardly embracing its alliance with Democrats instead of fighting to win support from what it says is an increasingly hostile Republican Party. At the same time, it is warning that its opponents are more tenacious than ever in an effort to harness the energy of young voters who supported President Barack Obama. Hogue, 43, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“When I first got to NARAL, we had a lot more Republicans,” said NARAL Policy Director Donna Crane, who has been with the group for more than a decade. “We lobbied a lot more [GOP] offices.”

The group was born nearly 44 years ago out of the early battle for abortion rights. Since then, it has worked to increase access to contraception and block congressional efforts to restrict abortions, often with the support of moderate Republicans.

Right. Because if your mother was a NARAL member, you probably wouldn't be here. You would have been an inconvenient cluster of cells to her, and we all know how that goes.

Like many stereotypes, it's not true.

"Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child. So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed."

"Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child. So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed."

I don't care.. If the abortion is not because of a case of rape, incest, or life of the mother is in danger; it is murder - Killing a baby because you can't afford it, or just don't want it, is a cop out of your responsibility. If that was the case, then you should A) quit laying on your back so much, and/or B) either get fixed, or have your husband get fixed.... I'm sick of listening to these pathetic liberals spout about how it is the women's right to choose. It is murder, plain and simple.

I don't care.. If the abortion is not because of a case of rape, incest, or life of the mother is in danger; it is murder - Killing a baby because you can't afford it, or just don't want it, is a cop out of your responsibility. If that was the case, then you should A) quit laying on your back so much, and/or B) either get fixed, or have your husband get fixed.... I'm sick of listening to these pathetic liberals spout about how it is the women's right to choose. It is murder, plain and simple.

Why isn't a baby created by rape or incest murder? Isn't murder simply murder. A viable life was extingished. Are the circumstances that brought that life in to being that significant? After all, the baby isn't responsible for how it was conceived, why should the baby be punished?

“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
James "Mad Dog" Mattis

FlaGator's position is certainly the most consistent. So is the position that the woman should be punished for "murder" as well as the doctor, but a lot of people make an exception there too. It's an academic argument, since you can't punish people for doing something legal (morality not being the same thing as legality).

"Today, [the American voter] chooses his rulers as he buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only certain that it is not what it pretends to be." - H.L. Mencken

"Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child. So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed."

First, I'd take any stats produced by an advocacy group with a salt lick. Why? Because they have admitted to fabrications in the past:

[W]e simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion... We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S... Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion laws... [A]bortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization.

If they lied about that, what else would they lie about? As for the second point, note that I said NARAL member, not customer. The membership of groups like NOW and NARAL are much more ideologically rigid about abortion and population controls, and they consider fetuses to be little more than inconvenient cell clusters. But don't take my word for it, take theirs:

[T]he abortion patient has a right not only to be rid of the growth, called a fetus, in her body, but also has a right to a dead fetus. . . [I] never have any intention of trying to protect the fetus, if it can be saved. . . as a general principle [t]here should not be a live fetus.

Robert Crist, abortion doctor, testifying in federal court in 1980

Anti-choicers have declared war on women. Now it's up to us to fight back. If that means guarding the clinic doors with Uzis, then that's what will have to be done. Just once, I'd like to see someone blow up one of those churches. . . This week is anti-choice week at UB. If you see one of them showing their disgusting videos or playing with toy fetuses, do your part and spit at them. Kick them in the head. . . Their God is worth nothing compared to my body. Abortion is a bit bloody. So is a root canal. It's a fucking operation! If you think abortion is gruesome, you should see childbirth; an ordeal that is ten times more dangerous to a woman's health ... The anti-choice movement is like self-help for them. Too bad there's no 'Fanatics Anonymous' to give them the help they need.

Michelle Goldberg, "Rant for Choice", The Spectrum, student paper at the State University of New York at Buffalo (October, 1995).

Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk. Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia... The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual. Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’

If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.

In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the existential choice for a woman is not abortion vs. no abortion, but, as [Garrett Hardin] has pointed out, abortion vs. compulsory childbearing. If others can force her to be a mother... then she is coerced into putting her body at the disposal of the fetus as if she were an unclaimed natural resource or a chattel slave.... Thus, the woman's most fundamental right of choice, the right to control her own body and happiness, is being abrogated.

Sharon Presley and Robert Cooke, The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense, Association of Libertarian Feminists.

I was co-counsel in Roe v. Wade, have sired zero children and one fetus, the abortion of which was recently recounted by my ex-wife [lead Roe attorney, Sarah Weddington] in her book, A Question of Choice. I had a vasectomy in 1969 and have never had one mement of regret.

James R. (Ron) Weddington, co-counsel in Roe v. Wade, in letter to then President-elect Clinton, encouraging him to step up abortion and other birth control for the poor source: Clinton Library, page 60.

Originally Posted by linda22003

FlaGator's position is certainly the most consistent. So is the position that the woman should be punished for "murder" as well as the doctor, but a lot of people make an exception there too. It's an academic argument, since you can't punish people for doing something legal (morality not being the same thing as legality).

This is true, but legally, there is a compelling argument in favor of abortion after rape, which is that the conception was the result of a crime, and therefore the baby who will be born is an accessory after the fact, especially in those cases where rape is used as a political means of ethnically cleansing a native population. However, according to the same study that you cited, rape and incest accounted for 1% of all abortions in the US. Here are the numbers:

Mother's Health (3%)

Baby has possible health problem (3%)

Rape or Incest (1%)

Couldn't Afford Baby (21%)

Not ready for the Responsibility (21%)

Concerned how child would change lives (16%)

A relationship problem (12%)

Not mature enough (11%)

Had all the children they wanted (8%)

Other (4%)

Throw in the mother's and baby's health concerns with the rape and incest stats, and you end up with 7% of all abortions falling under the definition of medically necessary or the result of victimization of the mother. The remaining reasons range from the frivolous to the materialistic, but none of them involve the emotional trauma of rape or the medical necessity that is so often cited. Which of these, if any, would you consider restricting?